Research Project: The History of the Conquest of Tenochtitlan

Funded with a Premio de Investigación José Antonio Alzate of the Academica Mexicana de Ciencias and Conacyt, Stefan Rinke is writing a history of the conquest of Tenochtitlan. Although controversies over the Conquista of Mexico date back for centuries, their relevance continues to this day, both inside and outside the Spanish-speaking world. With the campaign against Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, began in 1519 the Spanish expansion on the American mainland. For the first time Europeans subjected a highly organized state in a part of the world that had previously been unknown to them. In so doing, they laid the foundation of one of the first world-encompassing colonial empires. Already during the sixteenth century, Spanish chroniclers and historians came to see their country as the legitimate successor to the Roman Empire, whose greatness, they believed, Spain actually exceeded. Building on ideas like these assumptions about the superiority of Christian Europeans and the inferiority of other ethnic groups were rendered to a quasi natural order of things.